When to create new Sites, Portals etc.
Bill English has posted a great piece on sites, areas and portals over in his SharePoint Café*.
I think there is a simpler core set of factors around point III. A new portal represents a more formal boundary than separate areas. Within an enterprise organisation these boundaries are generally pretty obvious, they are the business units, divisions etc. The needs of these divisions fall into 3 categories :-
- Some of these will use Portals to publish to their own members (e.g. an R&D function)
- Others will publish out to the rest of the organisation (e.g. HR)
- The hardest of the lot are groups that publish to both (e.g. IT).
It would be awkward for a division to have more than one portal so in the third case crafty use of area permissions should give one portal different looks to internal and external users.
This model also fits with the sizing limits of SharePoint Portal Server 2003. In a shared service farm you can sensibly house a few tens of portals (there is a true limit of something like 70 but things generally you don't want to be running at the limit). When thinking about a Portal model in a large organisation you should be thinking “If I divided my company into 20 units what would they be ?“
In smaller organisations it can be much harder to determine these boundaries, often they don't really exist. It's generally blindingly obvious if you need multiple portals, if you are not sure you probably don't need it.
Also it should be pointed out that sometimes a particular requirement may utilise more than one of these elements. For example, work in progress should be run in the collaborative team site environment,
however once a piece of work is completed it should be promoted into a portal area. From what I've seen areas are generally best as shopfronts for final documents.
Steven
* Bill, did you know there is a SharePoint Café in Microsoft's UK Offices ? They have some great remote control boats you can play with while sipping a latte.